TURNER – Peering first at a hand-drawn map and then out at the Bear Pond archaeological site, Bob Bartone pointed out the spot where someone sat making stone tools 8,000 years ago.
Bartone, who is the University of Maine at Farmington Archaeology Center’s assistant director, explained when someone knaps stone tools, flakes fall all around them. A high concentration of flint-like stone flakes found in some confined areas on the site are evidence, then, that a person made tools there, he said.
In some ways, Bartone said, a Paleo-Indian site like Bear Pond doesn’t give archaeologists much to go on. Archaeologists study material culture, he said – the day-to-day things of life – pots and pans, clothing, tools, bones, whatever’s left behind.
In the acidic soil of the wet Maine mountains, organic remains tend to decompose quickly. And the Paleo-Indians, who came here soon after the glaciers receded, did not leave any pottery behind.
But in other ways, Bartone said, “this site is almost like a snapshot – it’s like a quick slice of time.” Lots of sites have been lived on intermittently for thousands of years. Sometimes, he said, archaeologists even find “features” (areas of soil darkened by things like decaying food and other organic remains, or ash from fires) with artifacts from multiple periods.
The Bear Pond site is unusual, he said, in that it was only lived on for a short period of time – a few weeks to a few years in one archaeological period. Bartone thinks it was home to only a small number of people, given the fact a relatively small number of artifacts (fewer than 10 tools and thousands of flakes) have been found.
From the scraping tools and the shape of the projectile point fragments – arrowheads – that have been found, he also surmises people there butchered meat that had been killed.
Bartone and other UMF Archaeology Center staff dig all around the Northeast, in sites ranging from the Paleo-Indian period right up to 100 years ago.
Center Director Ellen Cowie said the UMF archaeologists work as consultants for developers and companies building on sites protected by town, state or federal laws. Before getting building permits, she explained, people developing potentially historic sites are required to hire archaeologists, who do exploratory digs.
For some developers, having to hire archaeologists can be frustrating, but most people understand it’s important. “There’s a respect we as a people have” for our cultural heritage, she said.
Whether on consulting jobs or doing other research, Cowie said, archaeologists spend their days trying to draw conclusions about people’s worlds from the tiny fragments of day-to-day life found at sites like Bear Pond.
At more recent sites, she said, you can find more. Some pottery maybe, or even a bone fragment. Still, what’s left of a person’s material life after hundreds, or thousands, of years has gone by barely scratches the surface of what was once there, Cowie says. They had clothing, probably had baskets and wooden tools, and more. “Imagine the richness of it,” she said.
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